WWDC 2011 Keynote – 24 hours later

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

I started this week truly eager to see what Apple had in store for us at WWDC 2011. By the end of the keynote, I was lost in a sea of possibilities. My social networks had exploded in this odd symphony of love, hate, apathy, and ignorance in unison over the presentation. This alone confirmed what I had already known: Apple had done it again. At the end of the day, I knew the keynote would be discussed to death until every announced feature and product is released this fall. I did, however, walk away from this with some thoughts about the future.

I don’t think there will be a new iPhone this year, and that could be a really good thing

This isn’t what the gearheads want to hear, and that’s OK. The fact of the matter is that in order to provide a competitive device in this market, Apple would need to compromise on design and battery life. Let’s face it, those are two things Apple has over the competition at the end of the day.

LTE chips aren’t where they need to be in order to occupy the same room as the existing radio, and the battery consumption on LTE is still pretty extreme. Additionally, if Apple waits a little while, LTE will be live on both AT&T and Verizon, allowing both versions of the iPhone to exist without favor, as they will both be “the same”.

The other big thing that is likely to be in the next iPhone is a very nice processor. The same problem exists here in terms of battery consumption and physical size, especially if Apple decides to just full on jump to a quad-core processor, in which case the release would be in direct competition with the offerings on the way from Qualcom and NVIDIA.

By leveraging iOS 5 as the update this year instead of a hardware refresh, Apple stands the best chance to really wow everyone with an amazing new product when it hits.

Apple absorbed the best of the other platforms

Let’s go ahead and get that elephant out of the room. In an almost borg-like fashion, Apple assimilated the best of the competing platforms in its ecosystem and injected their purified essence onto its own platform. This includes basic, tiny things like the ability to set a unique sound for your alarm, notification, and calendar–features I am baffled that didn’t exist on iOS already, but that’s a story for another time.

This also includes big things like new notifications and a messenger app that everyone swears will be the nail in the coffin of both the BlackBerry and SMS . I’m not convinced that iMessages is exactly that, but it’s a nice idea, and one of several things Apple did to give users a reason to lock-in to Apple’s products. Unlike the unwashed masses of the social networks, I don’t see what Apple did as “stealing” ideas from either company. Sure, these concepts originated from RIM and Android, but it’s not like these are copy/paste concepts either.

All iMessages has to do is not crash in order to be better than BBM, but notifications are going to be a bit harder. In order to pull off the Notifications Center, Apple would have had to completely re-think how they do notifications in order for it to be effective, and as developers get to play with it we’ll know more.

Regardless of your opinion on the morality or the quality of the decisions made, Apple will have undoubtedly inspired their competition to continue to innovate, which will only benefit all of us in the end, so I personally welcome Apple’s efforts to improve via assimilation.

Rather then screw developers, Apple gave them lead time

Apple upset more than a few developers by releasing native features that already existed in app form, and had already begun to develop significant fanbases. Take the words of Marco Arment, inventor of Instapaper as an example. When Steve Jobs began showing off Reading List, a service that seems to copy Instapaper outright at first glance, his reply was a single word on Twitter. Some hours later, Arment had a better outlook on the situation, one that I feel can really be directly applied to all of the groups who were affected by these announcements. He basically summed it up as Apple making it easier to explain his own service to people, “It’s like Safari’s Reading List, but better, in these ways.”

There’s no reason this can’t be universally applied, especially considering that, especially in the mobile space, Apple’s unveil is still a few months off. This lead time is, for developers who care about staying relevant, the ability to make sure their product falls in line the same way Instapaper will – by offering features above and beyond what Apple is offering. This could, in a way, create a tiered experience. The Apple features show a user that this method of doing things is significant for a reason, and the developers apps take the experience to the next level once the user grasps the concept. Granted, this symbiotic relationship isn’t quite as universally applicable, especially to companies like Dropbox.

iCloud is a transitional point to the Cloud, but hardly the future

I’ve given a lot of thought recently to “The Cloud”. It started to get popular (again) as these individual services cropped up to provide singular utilities for users. As it has grown, these utilities have reformed into this sort of public space where things exist, with a username and password separating you from the rest of the world. There are some describing the iCloud as a new way to think about apps, not as a utility to enhance apps like Google is doing. I think the reality is a little more broad than this.

iCloud is an integrated, seemingly inclusive thing where you can push your data, but it still lives on all of your devices. You can store pictures, but only for 30 days, and then they need to live somewhere else. This sounds a whole lot more to me like the base building blocks for the “personal cloud”. In the personal cloud, your connected devices are the cloud, the data doesn’t live in some public utility permanently, but rather is used as a rapid access and transport mechanism for the things you own elsewhere.

The basis of many of these concepts exist in these early iCloud times, but I see services like iCloud growing into being much more significant. Take for example, Google Talk. On an Android device, if I have a conversation with someone and move to a computer, that conversation is not only there, but completely caught up, allowing me to move from mobile device to computer seamlessly. iCloud takes that concept and applies it to your documents and photos, and as it grows and innovates it will become much more.

The WWDC keynote should marked as a starting point, with the features unveiled rippling out for the next few months and years. Innovation and function will come from this event, as a result of the developers and competitors who will rise to the occasion and provide answers to Apple’s call. I don’t know that I am really ready to demote my computer or call this the Post PC era, but I am eagerly looking forward to see what comes next.